Why E-Books Look So Ugly

As books make the leap from cellulose and ink to electronic pages, some editors worry that too much is being lost in translation. Typography, layout, illustrations and carefully thought-out covers are all being reduced to a uniform, black-on-gray template that looks the same whether you’re reading Pride and Prejudice and Zombiesor the Federalist Papers.

“There’s a dearth of typographic expression in e-books today,” says Pablo Defendini, digital producer for Tor.com, the online arm of science fiction and fantasy publisher Tor Books. “Right now it’s just about taking a digital file and pushing it on to a e-book reader without much consideration for layout and flow of text.”

With the popularity of the Kindle and other e-book readers, electronic book sales in the United States have doubled every quarter. Though still a very small percentage of the overall book industry, sales of e-books touched $15.5 million in the first quarter of the year, up from $3.2 million the same quarter a year ago. By contrast, the printed book market sales in North America alone was nearly $14 billion in 2008.

The rapid growth of e-books has piqued many publishers’ interest, enabling Amazon to sign all the major publishers and offer more than 275,000 books in its Kindle store.

But despite the rapid growth, e-books are still new territory for most publishers. Add proprietary publishing standards such as the .mobi file format for the Amazon Kindle, and you have a recipe for confusion among many would-be e-book designers.

“E-books today are where the web was in its early years,” says Andrew Savikas, vice-president of digital initiatives at O’Reilly Media, a major publisher of technical books. “And some of those e-books are as difficult to read and browse as the early web pages.”

After spending a weekend with the Sony e-book reader, I found that the convenience of having so many books in a single, lightweight, slim device had me hooked, and its screen offers nearly print-like readability. But after about four hours of flipping through blocks of grey text I found myself feeling strangely melancholic. It couldn’t have been the lack of sunshine. Moving from one book to another, while easy, didn’t help: I was still staring at the same font, the same gray background and the same basic layout.

I had stumbled onto the reason why design and fonts are so important in publishing, says Mark Simonson, an independent typeface designer.

“Different typefaces are like like having different actors in play or different voices in an audio book,” Simonson says. “The variations in typeface influence the personality of the book. Sticking to one font is much like having the same actor play all the different parts.”

It’s why creative directors at publishing houses try so hard to make one book feel different from another, says Henry Sene Yee, creative director for publishing house Picador.

Sene Yee’s department is cover design. A book’s cover design can be photographic, illustrative, iconic, typographic or something more conceptual, he says. In each case the cover is a finely-tuned representation of the book’s genre and the message it wants to send.

“It’s about what we want readers to see in the book,” says Sene Yee, who says his job is part designer, part ad man. He spends more than two weeks coming up with the first sketch of a book cover — one that he hopes will bait readers in.

If readers are not familiar with a writer, they make impulse buys in bookstores or even online, “so covers are what make readers pick up a book they don’t know,” says Sene Yee.

So, if book design is so important, why is it so absent from e-books today?

“Ultimately the sticking point for e-books is accessibility,” says Defendini. “A large component of this is making sure the text flows right and the fonts are appropriate, even while giving the reader choice to change that. That flies in the face of the traditional role of a typographer, who is in minute control of everything.”

Designing a cover specifically for an e-book is rare: Most e-book covers are digital images of their print namesakes. That’s likely to change soon, says Savikas, who compares e-book stores today to how Apple’s iPhone App stores were when launched.

“With the iPhone App store we have seen app creators get more sophisticated with their choice of icons or the screenshots they use to attract buyers,” Savikas says.

E-books publishers are likely to get there soon, agrees Tor.com’s Defendini.

“The illustrators will be big winners soon,” Defendini says. “The social aspect of buying e-books will go up, just like it did with apps and music.”

When it comes to the guts of the e-book, fundamental aspects such as fonts and page layouts become a battle. There’s a dearth of typographic expression in e-books, says Defendini. That’s because e-readers’ firmware offers few font choices. Licensing custom fonts from a well-known foundry or font designer, a ubiquitous practice in print book design, is an impossibility for e-books.

Savikas says O’Reilly Media learned the hard way when the first-generation Kindle was released. The technology publisher found that the Kindle did not have a way to ensure that blocks of computer code would remain intact and properly formatted.

“As a publisher we are not necessarily looking for 800 different font choices,” says Savikas. “But even at this early stage we are looking for a set of standard fonts that guaranteed to be in any device or software.

“It was frustrating to contrast the Kindle’s limited fonts with that of the iPhone, which has very rich support for fonts, spacing and layout,” he says.

A big part of the problem with the Kindle (the largest selling e-books reader) is its use of the Amazon-specific .mobi file format, rather than the open standard ePub. ePub is based on the XML and CSS standards used in millions of web pages and allows for far more control over layouts than is currently possible with the .mobi file format.

As a result, if publishers want to sell Kindle books, producers like Defendini have to do a lot of manual work to create the digital file. In some cases, that means almost page-by-page customization, ensuring that drop caps appear correctly and that text flows around illustrations properly.

E-books won’t stay ugly forever, says Sene Yee. The devices’ limitations are mostly because they are in their early stages. For instance, color e-book readers are not likely to be widely available until at least mid-2010. And the current black-and-white displays offer readers no choice beyond increasing or decreasing font size.

As e-book readers get more popular they will get more sophisticated, bringing in a new crop of designers that understand a changing world of digital publishers.

“People want more than just plain text and the technology will have to change and keep up with this need,” says Sene Yee. “It won’t stay ugly forever.”

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